$600 Chromebooks are a dangerous development for Microsoft

Post by benplumley » Sat, Sep 01, 2018, 5:04 PM UTC

skymt wrote: post #89

sarcasmic wrote: post #24

Any Chromebook more than $400 right now is just there to absorb even more disposable income from the market, because they ship with nicer finishes and faster processors, but they are anemic on memory and storage, making them subpar for intense multitasking, or getting certain types of work done. The situations in which they excel can be reliably hit by Chromebooks around a $400 price point, and even cheaper Chromeboo…

> I suspect one reason for $600 devices, other than Google itself trying to reposition Chromebooks as more upmarket, is because $600 Windows laptops are still are a mess of preloaded bullshit put there by the vendor. Microsoft has tried various ways to fix this but it only tends to protect high-end models. In the current version of Windows 10 there's a feature called "fresh start" that makes it trivial to reset to a…

Post by ac29 » Sat, Sep 01, 2018, 5:06 PM UTC

nextos wrote: post #84

sarcasmic wrote: post #24

Any Chromebook more than $400 right now is just there to absorb even more disposable income from the market, because they ship with nicer finishes and faster processors, but they are anemic on memory and storage, making them subpar for intense multitasking, or getting certain types of work done. The situations in which they excel can be reliably hit by Chromebooks around a $400 price point, and even cheaper Chromeboo…

I'm interested in Chromebooks for a different reason, the same reason that brings me to Pixel phones. I hate software that tracks me, but if I wipe out Android and I install a self compiled AOSP, it's a superb user experience for me. Will these more upmarket Chromebooks (which have x86 CPUs and acceptable RAM & storage) be OK to run any regular Linux distro? Right now, Xiaomi laptops are excellent cheap machines to r…

Post by wu-ikkyu » Sat, Sep 01, 2018, 5:08 PM UTC

mindslight wrote: post #54

open-source-ux wrote: post #7

Don't forget that ChromeOS is an operating system (OS) that tracks everything you do. To use the OS to the full requires a Google account, so you aren't even anonymous while you use it. (As a reminder, your Google account = your name, your date of birth, your location, your gender and mobile phone number i.e. some of your most private and personal details.) We've seen Microsoft criticised, quite rightly, for introduc…

> if you think it's fine for ChromeOS to record everything you do in the OS, you equally think it's fine for Windows/Mac OS/Ubuntu to record everything you do too nit: It's reasonable to not fret about one additional way that proprietary OSs can abuse their users, but still not want to see surveillance culture normalized on a Free software distribution.

Post by sdegutis » Sat, Sep 01, 2018, 5:09 PM UTC

sarcasmic wrote: post #24

Any Chromebook more than $400 right now is just there to absorb even more disposable income from the market, because they ship with nicer finishes and faster processors, but they are anemic on memory and storage, making them subpar for intense multitasking, or getting certain types of work done. The situations in which they excel can be reliably hit by Chromebooks around a $400 price point, and even cheaper Chromeboo…

Post by anoncoward111 » Sat, Sep 01, 2018, 5:10 PM UTC

lioeters wrote: post #116

anoncoward111 wrote: post #2

$100 Pre-2010 laptops running Lubuntu are an even more dangerous threat that more and more people are learning about

The first time I tried Lubuntu, was on an old, no-name brand laptop with Windows XP, that a friend gave me. Installed in a few minutes, and was pleasantly surprised how performant and usable it is, considering the limited hardware resources. I mostly just use it as a browser and book reader, but for giving new life to old laptops, I think Lubuntu works great. Not sure how much of a threat to the market it is though..…